Posts Tagged With: monty python and the holy grail

I’m currently in Yorkshire, sampling the heady delights of rolling hills, ruined abbeys and the local chips – so you’ll have to wait a bit for more serious content. And yes, if you hadn’t noticed, the video reviews have been sadly absent. The first one took far longer to do than I thought it would and frankly I think there are other things I could be doing with my time. So I’m ditching it. Maybe another year, but not this one.

Have a few images to keep you going. We start with the obvious.

And yes, in answer to your question, I am working on a video version of this, but we need to wait for the unscored upload for ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’ first. Otherwise it’s going to be all over the place.

Speaking of all over the place, the DW location scouts have been all over the place in their search for exotic filming spots. They found one off the coast of South Africa that stood in for the planet known only as Desolation, but there was still something rather familiar about some of the scenery.

Ah, Steven Moffat. Now there was a man who loved teasing his audience. It was never enough just to put a twist in; his goal, played out with nigh-on obsessive abandon, was the trail of breadcrumbs. Whether it’s Sherlock surviving his fall from the roof, the true identity of Ms Utterson from Jekyll, or what was really in the Doctor’s room in that creepy hotel, it wasn’t genuine Moffat without a puzzle for everyone to solve. It’s a far cry from the days when Doctor Who was aired once and then had to be revisited via Target novels because no one had a video recorder and in any case the BBC had already wiped the tapes. Repeat viewing is not only encouraged, it’s practically mandatory, along with all the bells and whistles of online discussion, dissection and deconstruction.

Still, Moffat’s gone now, so we can’t do that anymore, right? Wrong!

If you’re new here, you won’t know that I spend much of my time during series broadcasts going back through last week’s episodes searching them for things that will come back to haunt us later. Because as everyone in the Doctor Who production offices knows, there is NO SUCH THING as an accident. Every sign, every prop, every seemingly inconsequential bit of detail – from the shape of buildings to the seemingly random use of filming locations – is a potentially VITAL CLUE that gives us CLEAR AND SIGNIFICANT FORESHADOWING for events later in the series.

And guess what? Chibnall has apparently inherited Moffat’s clue fixation. Because when I went back through ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’ I found a whole bunch of stuff – and today, dearest reader, I bring it to you, served up with a salad garnish and a complimentary Americano. Come with us now as we explore a world of signs and wonders that will LITERALLY make your head explode.

We start on a train.

Observe the two numbers by the wall panel – one directly above Jodie Whittaker’s head, one at the upper left of the screen. We’ll get to that one in a moment, but let’s look at 68509 first. It is – as if you hadn’t guessed – a reference to the zip code for Lincoln, Nebraska, where the TARDIS crew are set to land in an episode from Series 12. The Nebraska DHHS is here, which will presumably be a plot point as the Doctor refuses to go anywhere that’s just initials.

Do acronyms count? Because there’s a very prominent one just above – UNIT. And the numbers that follow – 9110, for ease of reference – refer EXPLICITLY AND UNAMBIGUOUSLY to UNIT. Why is this? Well, the first two allude to Marc Platt’s novelisation of ‘Battlefield’, released in print form in July 1991, while the 10 refers to 2010, the year in which The Sarah Jane Adventures broadcast their 2010 crossover episode ‘The Death of the Doctor’, which saw Sarah Jane team up both with the Eleventh Doctor and former member of UNIT staff Jo Grant, as played by Katy Manning. We’ve been asking for another appearance from Jo for years, and it looks like we might finally be about to get our wish.

(As an aside, this is a good time to mention that I finally met Katy Manning last December. She was absolutely lovely, despite me squealing like a fanboy. I have it on good authority that she is like that with everyone.)

But was it a nod to Jo Grant, or was it actually about Matt Smith? Consider this screen grab from Ryan’s YouTube monologue.

There are a number of things going on here, in a quite literal sense. Ryan’s thumbs up rating sits at Eleven (capitalisation intentional) while his thumbs down is sitting at two. Leaving aside the question of exactly what sort of callous bastard would rank down a video where you were talking about your dead grandmother, we also need to consider what number you get when you add eleven and two.

I will leave it to you, dear reader, to do the math(s).

Ryan’s view count is nineteen, which is a CLEAR AND UNAMBIGUOUS reference to Paul Hardcastle’s iconic song about the Vietnam War, indicating a likely story arc for Series 12. And his subscriber count is sitting pretty at thirty-seven, which is not a random number and certainly NOT A COINCIDENCE. Thirty-seven, you will recall, is the age of Dennis the political peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – a film that introduced us to the delightful Tim the Enchanter. You see? There was a whopping great clue about the identity of this episode’s villain smack bang in the middle of the opening scene, and not ONE of you noticed. Not one. I’m not angry, folks, I’m just disappointed.

A funeral next, because we need to talk about the balloons.

There are sixteen balloons, which allude to the thirteen canonical Doctors, plus John Hurt, Richard Hurndall and David Bradley: in short, sixteen actors who have played the Doctor onscreen in official BBC stories. (There are probably more; don’t tell me about them because it’ll spoil the pattern.) Note that the Eighth Doctor is directly over Bradley Walsh’s head. Also note that Paul McGann’s Holby City storyline seems to be drawing to a natural close – it may have wrapped up by the time you read this and it may even have wrapped already, as I’m writing it. We’re two episodes behind so please don’t spoil it for me.

Additionally, notice the colour scheme. There are three:

Never mind the subtle but CLEAR-CUT indication that Lalla Ward will soon be back as Romana – has anyone else noticed that there’s one missing? The short, scooter-riding one? The one who shares her name with a famous author?

There are a number of episode titles we could mash here, such as The Tell-Tale Hearts, or The Satan Pit and the Pendulum, or simply The Oblong Box, which doesn’t need any modification. But could the imminent appearance of the great writer himself – a man whom the Doctor has encountered several times before – be any more clear cut? To borrow one of Gareth’s jokes, quoth the raven: “Again again!”

We’ll conclude at the end of the episode, in this scene in the charity shop where the Doctor picks out her outfit.

“But how can you tell it was a charity shop?” some people on Facebook have been whining, to which the answer is “Of course it’s a bloody charity shop”. I mean, look at it. There are books on the shelves and there’s a pile of bric-a-brac near the clothes racks. Yes, the changing room is unusually big. Maybe Cardiff has an obesity problem. Besides, where else are you going to find that sort of mismatched ensemble, other than in the dressing up box at a local children’s centre?

I mentioned this to Emily, who said “Well, of course it’s a charity shop. I can just picture her going through those t-shirts. ‘Ooh, look, this one says Sarah-Jane Smith. That rings a bell’.”

I laughed, and then said “Listen, if Sarah-Jane was still stitching name labels in her clothes in her her mid-twenties, I’m glad the Doctor left her in Aberdeen.”

But I’m sidetracking. Because there’s a reason they went to this particular charity shop (or thrift store, if you’re reading this in the other side of the Atlantic). Where is it? If you’re in Cardiff you could probably have told me without having to look it up, but I had to do a bit of legwork – a word which in this context means ‘look at Google Maps’. There are plenty of charity shops in Cardiff, but we may narrow it down by using the Domino Pizza emporium on the other side of the street as an anchor.

To cut a long story short, it is this one:

“KIDNEYS!”

This is loaded with detail. Never mind the fact that there is a phone box RIGHT THERE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET, indicating that not only is the much-anticipated Bill & Ted 3 movie finally out of production hell, but that IT WILL BE A DOCTOR WHO CROSSOVER – never mind all that, have you seen the sign just above the housing association window? You know, the one about landlords? Are we heading back to Bristol? Could David Suchet’s Series 10 character be about to make a sudden, unanticipated return? Well, it’s no longer anticipated, is it? We called it, right here. Watch this space.

But wait! There’s more. The address for this particular map reference is 202 Cowbridge Road, and in production history we find that story 202 was ‘The End of Time’, a CLEAR AND UNAMBIGUOUS nod to the IMMINENT RETURN of Rassilon, presumably in the Christmas special. Sadly there’s no word on whether he’ll be played by Donald Sumpter, so we may need to look further afield. Anyone got Jeremy Irons’ phone number?

But wait! There’s STILL more. Look across the street.

Let’s ignore the near miss on that sign, shall we? I suspect the owners are very grateful that it’s the U that’s missing, rather than the O. Besides, we’re now in Series 6 territory: Canton referring, of course, to Canton Everett Delaware III, the Doctor’s erstwhile companion during his battle with the Silence, and who has by the present day moved into local radio, producing a couple of hours of disco-themed music on a weekly basis for online radio station NTS, broadcasting from London, Los Angeles, Shanghai and Manchester. Who else saw that coming? I know I didn’t.

But as if this weren’t enough, scroll back up to that first picture again and note the Registered Charity Number on the sign above the Kidney Research window. It’s 252892 – seemingly innocuous, right? Wrong again. Because a curious thing happens if you stick this into the hex box for an RGB colour converter. I know because I did it, and I could scarcely believe the shade that appeared on the display:

As is customary with my video postings, I suggest you watch this first. Then we’ll talk. Go on, I can wait. Or you can just watch it and ignore the commentary below; I’m good with that.

—

—

Emily and I are halfway through the Key to Time series. Thus far we’ve seen Ian Cuthbertson set up a con for a despotic military tyrant, and we’ve watched Bruce Purchase bellow at the Doctor. Last weekend we got to ‘The Stones of Blood’, in which the Doctor visits the Rollright Stones and bumps into an elderly (but feisty) archaeologist and fends off an ancient demonic entity, while Mary Tamm falls off a cliff.

If you’ve not seen ‘Stones…’ I don’t want to give too much away, but there is a scene later on set on board a spacecraft in which the Doctor and Romana bump into Tinkerbell and one of the other fairies. Said fairies – actually justice machines acting as a kind of disembodied judge, jury and executioner – are there to provide a comic relief of sorts, although there is a sinister undercurrent to their banter. They play a crucial role in the story, but it is in the first encounter with the Doctor and Romana that the seeds of this video were sown. Because as we watched the two Time Lords sneaking away up the corridor, leaving the two Justice Machines talking to thin air until they realise what’s happened, I instantly recalled the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when the three-headed knight turns to devour a now absent Sir Robin, only to declare “He’s buggered off!”. (I found out later that Gareth had exactly the same thought.)

It’s one of my favourite lines in the film, along with Tim the Enchanter and the oft-quoted “You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you”. But Saturday night saw my head in a flurry, joining dots and making connections. Sleep was slow to come and broken. Because this needed to be done, but why stop there? There are other Doctor Who / Monty Python mashups, of course. Someone has rather cleverly stuck a ring mod on John Cleese’s French Knight and then pasted the .wav files into ‘Dalek’. It works rather well. But something told me that Classic Who would work best here, so that’s where we started.

The first problem you have is the sheer wealth of material. There are certain characters and scenes that cry out to be included, and as much as the Knights Who Say Ni irritate me (when you have a friend who does the entire scene over and over, on busses and at parties and in the pub, it tends to lose its appeal) they had to go in. So, too, did the flying rabbit. But when it comes to matching this up with Doctor Who there’s an abundance of exterior shots on bleak moors and masked characters who can be easily redubbed. So I stuck with what I knew best, which was Baker.

The rabbit scene that opens was about the first thing I did. Both this and the Camelot ‘model’ near the end were almost afterthoughts designed to vary the routine a bit – three minutes of redubbed characters can get a bit tedious, even if they’re all from Monty Python. Frustrations kicked in when I was doing the guards outside Swamp Castle – considering how much running there is in Doctor Who, it was almost impossible to find one of Tom Baker running towards the camera in an exterior setting, with the exception of the shot in ‘Terror of the Zygons’, which wasn’t really long enough and which in any case I’d already used. So you have a bit from ‘The Deadly Assassin’ instead, and I suppose it works well enough.

The scene in the dungeon with the sinister monks is from ‘The Masque of Mandragora’, and actually consists of two separate episodes – Hieronymous never addresses Sarah Jane in this manner, but the ‘sacrifice’ exchange was just too good to leave out. Similarly, I’ve wanted to do something with Magnus Greel ever since I first saw ‘The Talons of Weng Chiang’ a few years back, and both this and the ‘Stones of Blood’ interrogation were drawn up in a similar manner. Less is more here, which is why they’re all quite short. The whole thing could easily have been double its current length, but I’m trying to reign it in, because it’s easier to hold people’s attention when you’re not waffling (a lesson I really should learn when I’m writing).

And the song at the end? I needed something to finish, but really didn’t want to include the whole thing, so you get a heavily edited version. It draws on the really quite brilliant Star Trek version as its inspiration, although I wasn’t nearly so clever (on purpose; jump cuts would have thrown off the pace).

There is a better version of this waiting to be made – one that includes more Classic Doctors, more appropriate footage and some expanded dialogue. One day I may even do it myself. But this came together in a day, allowing for appropriate screen breaks and childcare duties, and that works in its favour. Ni!

If you ask most people, they’ll tell you that Life of Brian is a better film than Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It’s clever and sharply observed where Holy Grail is anarchic and silly. It combines a devastating attack on organised religion with memorable characters and some laugh-out-loud gags. It’s orderly and impeccably structured, whereas Holy Grail culminates in one of the biggest let-downs in the history of cinema (it may be funny, but we still feel like we’ve been cheated a bit). Life of Brian never really feels like surrealism; Holy Grail seldom feels like anything else.

For all that, Holy Grail is my favourite. I was fourteen when I watched it and the Pythons’ uproarious humour had me in stitches. I am one of these boring people who can quote entire scenes off the cuff (although I endeavour to avoid doing this at parties) – a film has to be seriously good to give me the motivation to commit it to memory. I love its sketch show feel and the way it builds up the balloon of Arthur’s grandiose pomposity only to periodically shoot it down, or prick it by the beak of an unladen African swallow. By contrast, I saw Life of Brian when I was an irritating student and my response, after all the hype, was “Meh”. I suspect seeing it these days, in a time when the Church more than ever resembles the institution that Cleese parodies in his People’s Front of Judea sequence, would force me to re-evaluate it. Still, for whatever reason it’s never had the same place in my heart.

Another film I saw in my irritating student days was Excalibur, which we watched as part of a module on film, TV and literature I was doing as part of my English degree. I remember discussing the religious symbolism, Nicol Williamson’s amazing performance as Merlin and that wonderful sequence where a rejuvenated Lancelot comes galloping into the fray to assist a doomed Arthur – but what struck me most was how Excalibur, despite the fact that it was made some seven years later, always seemed to be the film that Holy Grail was parodying. I’m sure that there are other cinematic tales of Arthurian legend that formed the source of the Pythons’ inspiration, but that’s still the way it feels – much like This Is Spinal Tap was a piss-take of Rattle and Hum, a few years early.

The fact is that Holy Grail contains some splendid, dramatic dialogue, which is usually followed by an absurd visual gag or ludicrous animated sequence. It is therefore ripe for a trailer mashup. Resequenced trailers are nothing new: Shining arguably planted the flag, all those years ago, and if it wasn’t necessarily the first it was at least the first to go truly viral. The folks who reworked Kubrick’s macabre masterpiece into an uplifting feelgood drama (appropriately scored to Peter Gabriel) opened a floodgate for a torrent of imitations, some of which worked better than others – the Brokeback Mountain stuff, for example, was funny for a while but quickly became irritating. Nonetheless, trailer mashups are still very popular: the ready availability of video editing software has made it easy to do and there are a lot of talented people out there who can spot where a truly miserable film can be remade into a romantic comedy, or a musical can become a horror movie.

So it was inevitable that I’d jump on the rickety bandwagon at some point. This formed in my head over the space of a couple of months and then came together on screen fairly quickly. I had few rules, except that it had to include certain key lines, it had to end with that battle on the hill, and it had to be scored – predictably but inevitably – to ‘O Fortuna’. Reimagining Monty Python and the Holy Grail as a serious, overblown epic wasn’t a new idea; there are several of them on YouTube already. Still, this one was mine. And I think it turned out reasonably well…